Lord's Resistance Army

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a Christian fundamentalist guerrilla group that was founded in 1987 in Uganda by Joseph Kony. The LRA's original goal was to create a multi-party democracy and to overthrow Yoweri Museveni's brutal dictatorship, but the LRA later devolved into a religious terrorist group that was not motivated by any particular political agenda apart from a theocratic ideology. Its numbers have waxed and waned, with the LRA having anywhere from 500 to 3,000 fighters in 2007, but merely 300-400 in 2011. The LRA has gained notoriety for abducting young boys and forcing them to fight as child soldiers, while they enslave young girls as sex slaves. Many of the group's leaders turned themselves in or had been killed by either Kony or the Ugandan Army by 2015, leaving Kony as the sole leader of the group.